The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
1908
A ship burns at sea. Two children are set adrift in a small boat. This is how Emmeline and Dick Lestrange arrive at Palm Tree Island, a paradise so lush and isolated it feels like the garden before the fall. For five years, they live alone with only the jungle, the lagoon, and Paddy Button, a weathered sailor who raises them and then drinks himself to death. The children's world is one of perfect innocence: they know nothing of sex, death, or the civilization waiting beyond the horizon. When they discover each other as teenagers, it's not with knowledge but with instinct. A child is born. Then, just as suddenly as they arrived, they're found and dragged back to a world they no longer recognize. The Blue Lagoon has the strange power of a fairy tale that refuses to stay gentle. Stacpoole writes about innocence with an urgency that feels almost pagan, asking what we truly are before society teaches us otherwise. It endures because it captures the impossible: that moment before everything changes, and how we can never return.
